Yes, America's best new restaurant of 2017 is a sandwich shop

On December 23, 2013, Mason Hereford posted a sandwich pic on Instagram. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it: sliced turkey, mayo, a red condiment of some sort, white cheddar, and lettuce on a French roll. Mason ate this exact sandwich from a deli in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, twice a week for 11 years while he was growing up. It was a perfectly acceptable lunch but not exactly the road to culinary enlightenment—unless you’re Mason Hereford. He captioned the photo: “The sandwich that started it all #turkeyandthewolf2016 #herbmayonnaise and #cranberryrelish.” No, he isn’t clairvoyant; Mason just knew that three years later, he would open the restaurant of his dreams.

The Best New Restaurant in America is a Sandwich Shop

Fast-forward to 2017, and there I was sitting in Mason’s newly opened sandwich joint, Turkey and the Wolf, in the sleepy Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans. The decor was garage sale bric-a-brac, the vibe was basement hangout, and Ween was playing on the speakers. I’d just polished off his riff on that turkey sub of his youth, which he made with ham (smoked in-house for ten hours), a thyme-and-dill-spiked mayo, sharp two-year-old cheddar, tart cranberry sauce from a can, and spicy arugula on a French roll. It was a study in textures, a superbly constructed sandwich that was more than the sum of its parts. I wished the ham-and-cheese versions my mom used to pack for me in my A-Team lunchbox were a tenth as good.

Owner Mason Hereford is "a cross between Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Willy Wonka."

Photo by Alex Lau

As amazing as that sandwich was, the other two I’d ordered (I was eating solo, I should mention) were otherworldly. Mason’s take on a bologna sandwich had nothing in common with the mayo-and-Wonder-Bread ones I grew up eating. In his, three slices of locally made bologna were griddle-fried, blanketed in American cheese, and stacked on thick-cut, butter-griddled Pullman slices with house-made hot mustard, Duke’s brand mayo, and “shrettuce” (what Mason calls shredded lettuce). It was further crunchified with two fistfuls of vinegar-brined potato chips. The whole thing was the size of a Chihuahua. Yet somehow I made room for another sandwich called a collard green melt, which I’d ordered purely out of curiosity. It turned out to be a double-decker sandwich of silky braised collards, tangy coleslaw, and Swiss cheese on rye bread. It was vegetarian, but it didn’t taste that way. In my four-plus decades on this planet, it’s the best sandwich I’ve ever crammed into my mouth, with a mastery of flavors and textures way beyond any sandwich joint. On the drive to the airport, I was stuffed, drunk on mayo, and hallucinating about sandwiches.

The menu isn't all sandwiches. Their salads, pastas, and gumbos are equally over-the-top delicious.

Photo by Alex Lau

Back in the Bon Appétit offices later that week, after having spent the better part of three months crisscrossing the country eating at every type of new restaurant I could stomach, I sat with my colleague Julia Kramer to pick this year’s Hot 10. We compared notes and experiences from hundreds of places, but all I could think about was that collard-green melt. After her own meal at Turkey and the Wolf, was she as infatuated with the place as I was? We ranked our finalists and read them aloud, alternating turns. When we reached No. 1, we both lit up. It was a consensus: Turkey and the Wolf was the best restaurant we ate in all year.

The Best Sandwiches In America

And then: panic. Were we prepared to call a quirky, nostalgic, counter service–only sandwich spot our No. 1 new restaurant in America? A place that serves what some might call, for better or for worse, stoner food? A joint with vintage Formica tables and kitschy cartoon animal salt-and-pepper shakers? A restaurant whose Instagram account is filled with head-scratching hashtags like #makesaladsnotyourbed, #eatbolognathenrideapony, and a bunch of others that we can’t print on this website?

We looked at each other and grinned. Yes, we were.

To understand the weird and wacky appeal of Turkey and the Wolf, it helps to learn about its 31-year-old ringleader, Mason Hereford. Picture a cross between Jeff Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Willy Wonka—laid-back but not lazy, with the curiosity and heart of a (big) kid. He sports what can only be described as a mullet, rollerblades without irony, and uses words like “dank” and “f*#%er” with abandon. One of his main culinary memories from growing up is that his family had a charge account at a local convenience store called Maupin Bros. Merchants. “My mom would let us get whatever the f*#% we wanted,” Mason says. “I would eat Doritos and Snickers bars, and I loved it.”

Not a salad person? You might reconsider when you meet Turkey and the Wolf's wedge salad with blue cheese dressing, topped with bacon and everything bagel toppings, or their cabbage salad topped with sunflower seeds and pig ear cracklins.

Photo by Alex Lau

That nostalgia for the foods and fashions of his early-’90s childhood inspires pretty much everything at Turkey and the Wolf. There’s that turkey sandwich, a tribute to his beloved childhood deli. There’s the fried bologna sandwich, influenced by the “sh*tty” version his mom made for him after school. The headcheese “tacos inauthenticos” are inspired partly by Taco Bell. The classic deviled eggs are like ones everyone would take to neighborhood gatherings, except Mason’s version comes topped with fried chicken skins and house-made hot sauce. And then there are cocktails with names like “When I was 10 I Went to School as a Dead Cheerleader for Halloween” and “The Best Part of Waking Up, at Noon.” Every dish and cocktail has a backstory or a memory that it’s rooted in. Then Mason and his team rip that idea to pieces, play with it, reassemble it, and, ultimately, improve it to the point where it becomes something totally new.

Given Mason’s résumé, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Before opening Turkey and the Wolf, he spent six years (three as chef de cuisine) at the innovative Coquette in New Orleans. His move from fine dining to scrappy upstart is emblematic of the direction many cooks are going today—ditching their pricey tasting menus and oh-so-serious kitchens for a chilled-out, affordable, and approachable style of dining.

Sandwich or not, the food at Turkey and the Wolf comes out on mismatched vintage china or those collectible McDonald’s and Disney plastic plates, purchased on eBay, that I prized as a kid. If you can’t smile at the fact that your lamb-neck roti arrives on a Hamburglar-adorned plate, well, I can’t help you. Cinder-block walls are lined with photos of his family and his favorite New Orleans bars and restaurants (shot by his brother, William). His mom, upon hearing that Mason was planning on opening a restaurant, turned to the internet and yard sales to collect many of the tables, chairs, and plates that fill the homey dining room.

The atmosphere is every bit as laid-back as the attitude in the kitchen. But when it comes to the food they serve, these people mean business.

Photo by Alex Lau

Don’t think for a second that just because Turkey and the Wolf serves its food on goofy plates or has a framed poster of a cat dressed like a sandwich that the cooking is a sloppy, intoxicant-fueled afterthought. What they are offering—wildly inventive sandwiches, salads tossed with ingredients like pig’s ear cracklin’s, and cheeky snacks like homemade Bagel Bites—is as difficult to pull off as most tweezer-built dishes found at so-called serious restaurants. That’s not because of the techniques involved. It’s because Mason’s menu plays with something more daunting: expectation. Turkey and the Wolf makes reference to foods that most of us have eaten hundreds of times. We all know what a bologna sandwich tastes like. Or at least we think we know. But Mason and his team make that bologna or ham or spicy chicken salad sandwich so special, so memorable, that you’ll happily pay $12 and come back next week. Now, winning me over with exotic and rare ingredients, techniques that take a kitchen of 15 to execute, and hand-thrown pottery is one thing. Earning my admiration with a simple sandwich served on a Star Wars plate? That’s something worth celebrating.

At the end of July, I returned to Turkey and the Wolf for my fourth visit. I wanted to spend the day hanging in the kitchen and witnessing the sandwich-making magic firsthand. No surprise: Mason’s crew is as kooky as his sandwiches. There’s Scotty Yelity, quick-witted and skinny as a rail, with the griddle proficiency of a Waffle House short-order cook. There’s bearded and husky Nate Barfield, who was perfecting biscuits for a new sandwich involving tempura mushrooms. Michael “Swade” Swadener, the kid of the kitchen, had just burnt a test run of the puppy chow, the classic Chex-based confection, soon to top the vanilla soft-serve. I met Kate Mirante, the general manager whom the kitchen affectionately refers to as the Seattle PD (a nod to her hometown and her penchant for keeping the kitchen on task); Migdalia Pabon, the Honduran utility player who does everything from wash dishes and pick lamb-neck meat to making beautiful corn tortillas for tacos; and Colleen Quarls, an up-and-coming chef de cuisine who followed Mason here from Coquette. She’s a lefty who turns spreading mayo on toast into an art form.

You can make the sandwich Andrew Knowlton calls "the best sandwich I’ve ever crammed into my mouth" yourself with this recipe.

Photo by Alex Lau

By the end of their three-hour lunch rush, the cooks had built 89 sandwiches (mostly bologna, lamb roti, and tomato—in that order), breezed through four quarts of Duke’s mayo (Mason says that they thought about making their own, “but Duke’s is king”), and broke down countless heads of iceberg into shrettuce. According to Colleen, those two staples—plus the American cheese and white bread—form the spiritual and practical backbone of the Turkey and Wolf kitchen.

There are, of course, plenty of chef-y ingredients and techniques on display here that you’d never expect to see at your average sub shop. Mason smokes his own hams and bacon. Pigs’ heads are cooked, picked, and made into headcheese. There’s Migdalia’s handmade tortillas. Mason’s friend and butcher, Leighann Smith, cures the bologna. His friend David Weiss bakes the buttery white bread from a recipe Mason learned at Coquette. And the hot English mustard is a family recipe passed down from Mason’s friend Via’s mom.

He insists that griddled bread, like a porterhouse, rest for a few minutes so that it firms up and stays crunchy. And the reason why a now-legendary chicken-fried steak sandwich was removed from the menu? “I was waking up the neighbors every morning pounding out all those damn strip steaks,” Mason confesses.

All this attention to detail matters. But ultimately, what makes every sandwich—every dish—at Turkey and the Wolf special is that it tells a story. It could be the restaurant’s, or it could be your own. “Recapturing a childhood memory is a really effective way to convey what our food is and what inspires it,” Mason says.

You can also eat and drink in the great outdoors in the restaurant's cozy, greenery-filled patio.

Photo by Alex Lau

As his dinner shift was coming to an end, Mason grabbed a crimson-red Creole tomato and offered to make me a sandwich (my reward for enduring a day’s worth of kitchen ridicule?). He cut it into four thick slices, seasoning them heavily with sea salt and freshly cracked pepper. He buttered the white bread, tossed them on the griddle until each side was golden and crunchy, let them rest, and then spread a thick layer of Duke’s on each slice. Unknowingly, Mason was building me my favorite sandwich on the planet: tomato and mayo. But then he did something unexpected, something downright sinister. He scattered an unholy number of roasted sunflower seeds on the bottom piece of bread. Next came torn basil, some dill, and a squeeze of lemon, then more salt and pepper. He sliced the sandwich into two triangles. I took a bite. Tomato juices and mayo swirled together and dripped down my arm. I took another bite. It was crunchy and soft and herby. It was familiar but unexpected—a tomato sandwich that triggered all the usual pleasure centers while tasting like no tomato sandwich I’ve ever had before. Mason had done the impossible.